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342
VIOLENCE AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT
— language the nature of capitalism what it was, how it
came into being, and what it was yet destined to become.
They pointed out that it was not individual employers
or individual statesmen or the Government or
even kings and princes who were responsible for the evils
of society, but that unemployment, misery, and oppression
were due to an economic system, and that so long
as capitalism existed the mass of humanity would be sunk
in poverty. They called attention to the long evolutionary
processes that had been necessary to change the entire
world from a state of feudalism into a state of capitalism
;
and how it was not due to man's will-power that the
great industrial revolution occurred, but to the growth of
machines, of steam, and of electrical power; and that it
was these that have made the modern world, with its
intense and terrible contrasts of riches and of poverty.
They also pointed out that little individual owners of
property were giving way to joint-stock companies, and
that these would in turn give way to even greater aggregations
of capital. An economic law was driving the
big capitalists to eat up the little capitalists. It was
forcing them to take from the workers their hand tools
and to drive them out of their home workshops ; it was
forcing them also to take from the small property owners
their little properties and to appropriate the wealth of the
world into their own hands. As a result of this economic
process, "private property," they said, "is already
done away with for nine-tenths of the population." (5)
But they also pointed out that capitalism had within itself
the seeds of its own dissolution, that it was creating
a new class, made up of the overwhelming majority, that
was destined in time to overthrow capitalism. "What the
bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own
grave diggers." (6) In the interest of society the nine-